No More Learning

While he abandons
himself to the impulse of his imagination, his compositions are not only
the sweetest and the most sublime, but also the most faultless, that the
world has ever seen. But, as soon as his critical powers come into play,
he sinks to the level of Cowley; or rather he does ill what Cowley did
well. All that is bad in his works is bad elaborately, and of malice
aforethought. The only thing wanting to make them perfect was, that he
should never have troubled himself with thinking whether they were
good or not. Like the angels in Milton, he sinks "with compulsion and
laborious flight. " His natural tendency is upwards. That he may soar, it
is only necessary that he should not struggle to fall. He resembles an
American Cacique, who, possessing in unmeasured abundance the metals
which in polished societies are esteemed the most precious, was utterly
unconscious of their value, and gave up treasures more valuable than the
imperial crowns of other countries, to secure some gaudy and far-fetched
but worthless bauble, a plated button, or a necklace of coloured glass.

We have attempted to show that, as knowledge is extended and as the
reason develops itself, the imitative arts decay. We should, therefore,
expect that the corruption of poetry would commence in the educated
classes of society. And this, in fact, is almost constantly the case.
The few great works of imagination which appear in a critical age are,
almost without exception, the works of uneducated men. Thus, at a
time when persons of quality translated French romances, and when the
universities celebrated royal deaths in verses about tritons and fauns,
a preaching tinker produced the Pilgrim's Progress. And thus a ploughman
startled a generation which had thought Hayley and Beattie great poets,
with the adventures of Tam O'Shanter. Even in the latter part of the
reign of Elizabeth the fashionable poetry had degenerated. It retained
few vestiges of the imagination of earlier times. It had not yet been
subjected to the rules of good taste. Affectation had completely tainted
madrigals and sonnets. The grotesque conceits and the tuneless numbers
of Donne were, in the time of James, the favourite models of composition
at Whitehall and at the Temple. But, though the literature of the Court
was in its decay, the literature of the people was in its perfection.
The Muses had taken sanctuary in the theatres, the haunts of a class
whose taste was not better than that of the Right Honourables and
singular good Lords who admired metaphysical love-verses, but whose
imagination retained all its freshness and vigour; whose censure and
approbation might be erroneously bestowed, but whose tears and laughter
was never in the wrong. The infection which had tainted lyric and
didactic poetry had but slightly and partially touched the drama. While
the noble and the learned were comparing eyes to burning-glasses, and
tears to terrestrial globes, coyness to an enthymeme, absence to a pair
of compasses, and an unrequited passion to the fortieth remainder-man in
an entail, Juliet leaning from the balcony, and Miranda smiling over the
chess-board, sent home many spectators, as kind and simple-hearted
as the master and mistress of Fletcher's Ralpho, to cry themselves to
sleep.

No species of fiction is so delightful to us as the old English drama.
Even its inferior productions possess a charm not to be found in any
other kind of poetry. It is the most lucid mirror that ever was held up
to nature. The creations of the great dramatists of Athens produce the
effect of magnificent sculptures, conceived by a mighty imagination,
polished with the utmost delicacy, embodying ideas of ineffable majesty
and beauty, but cold, pale, and rigid, with no bloom on the cheek, and
no speculation in the eye. In all the draperies, the figures, and the
faces, in the lovers and the tyrants, the Bacchanals and the Furies,
there is the same marble chillness and deadness. Most of the characters
of the French stage resemble the waxen gentlemen and ladies in the
window of a perfumer, rouged, curled, and bedizened, but fixed in
such stiff attitudes, and staring with eyes expressive of such utter
unmeaningness, that they cannot produce an illusion for a single moment.
In the English plays alone is to be found the warmth, the mellowness,
and the reality of painting. We know the minds of men and women, as we
know the faces of the men and women of Vandyke.

The excellence of these works is in a great measure the result of
two peculiarities, which the critics of the French school consider as
defects,--from the mixture of tragedy and comedy, and from the length
and extent of the action. The former is necessary to render the drama
a just representation of a world in which the laughers and weepers are
perpetually jostling each other,--in which every event has its
serious and ludicrous side. The latter enables us to form an intimate
acquaintance with characters with which we could not possibly become
familiar during the few hours to which the unities restrict the poet.
In this respect, the works of Shakspeare, in particular, are miracles
of art. In a piece, which may be read aloud in three hours, we see a
character gradually unfold all its recesses to us. We see it change with
the change of circumstances. The petulant youth rises into the politic
and warlike sovereign. The profuse and courteous philanthropist sours
into a hater and scorner of his kind. The tyrant is altered, by the
chastening of affliction, into a pensive moralist. The veteran general,
distinguished by coolness, sagacity, and self-command, sinks under a
conflict between love strong as death, and jealousy cruel as the grave.
The brave and loyal subject passes, step by step, to the extremities
of human depravity. We trace his progress, from the first dawnings of
unlawful ambition to the cynical melancholy of his impenitent remorse.
Yet, in these pieces, there are no unnatural transitions. Nothing is
omitted: nothing is crowded. Great as are the changes, narrow as is the
compass within which they are exhibited, they shock us as little as the
gradual alterations of those familiar faces which we see every evening
and every morning. The magical skill of the poet resembles that of the
Dervise in the Spectator, who condensed all the events of seven years
into the single moment during which the king held his head under the
water.

It is deserving of remark, that, at the time of which we speak, the
plays even of men not eminently distinguished by genius,--such, for
example, as Jonson,--were far superior to the best works of imagination
in other departments. Therefore, though we conceive that, from causes
which we have already investigated, our poetry must necessarily have
declined, we think that, unless its fate had been accelerated by
external attacks, it might have enjoyed an euthanasia, that genius might
have been kept alive by the drama till its place could, in some degree,
be supplied by taste,--that there would have been scarcely any interval
between the age of sublime invention and that of agreeable imitation.
The works of Shakspeare, which were not appreciated with any degree of
justice before the middle of the eighteenth century, might then have
been the recognised standards of excellence during the latter part of
the seventeenth; and he and the great Elizabethan writers might have
been almost immediately succeeded by a generation of poets similar to
those who adorn our own times.

But the Puritans drove imagination from its last asylum. They prohibited
theatrical representations, and stigmatised the whole race of dramatists
as enemies of morality and religion. Much that is objectionable may be
found in the writers whom they reprobated; but whether they took the
best measures for stopping the evil appears to us very doubtful, and
must, we think, have appeared doubtful to themselves, when, after the
lapse of a few years, they saw the unclean spirit whom they had cast out
return to his old haunts, with seven others fouler than himself.

By the extinction of the drama, the fashionable school of poetry,--a
school without truth of sentiment or harmony of versification,--without
the powers of an earlier, or the correctness of a later age,--was left
to enjoy undisputed ascendency. A vicious ingenuity, a morbid quickness
to perceive resemblances and analogies between things apparently
heterogeneous, constituted almost its only claim to admiration. Suckling
was dead. Milton was absorbed in political and theological controversy.
If Waller differed from the Cowleian sect of writers, he differed for
the worse. He had as little poetry as they, and much less wit; nor is
the languor of his verses less offensive than the ruggedness of theirs.
In Denham alone the faint dawn of a better manner was discernible.

But, low as was the state of our poetry during the civil war and the
Protectorate, a still deeper fall was at hand. Hitherto our literature
had been idiomatic. In mind as in situation we had been islanders. The
revolutions in our taste, like the revolutions in our government, had
been settled without the interference of strangers. Had this state of
things continued, the same just principles of reasoning which, about
this time, were applied with unprecedented success to every part of
philosophy would soon have conducted our ancestors to a sounder code of
criticism. There were already strong signs of improvement. Our prose
had at length worked itself clear from those quaint conceits which still
deformed almost every metrical composition. The parliamentary debates,
and the diplomatic correspondence of that eventful period, had
contributed much to this reform. In such bustling times, it was
absolutely necessary to speak and write to the purpose. The absurdities
of Puritanism had, perhaps, done more. At the time when that odious
style, which deforms the writings of Hall and of Lord Bacon, was almost
universal, had appeared that stupendous work, the English Bible,--a book
which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone
suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power. The respect
which the translators felt for the original prevented them from adding
any of the hideous decorations then in fashion. The groundwork of the
version, indeed, was of an earlier age. The familiarity with which the
Puritans, on almost every occasion, used the Scriptural phrases was no
doubt very ridiculous; but it produced good effects. It was a cant; but
it drove out a cant far more offensive.

The highest kind of poetry is, in a great measure, independent of those
circumstances which regulate the style of composition in prose. But with
that inferior species of poetry which succeeds to it the case is widely
different. In a few years, the good sense and good taste which had
weeded out affectation from moral and political treatises would, in the
natural course of things, have effected a similar reform in the sonnet
and the ode. The rigour of the victorious sectaries had relaxed.
A dominant religion is never ascetic. The Government connived at
theatrical representations. The influence of Shakspeare was once more
felt. But darker days were approaching. A foreign yoke was to be imposed
on our literature. Charles, surrounded by the companions of his long
exile, returned to govern a nation which ought never to have cast him
out or never to have received him back. Every year which he had passed
among strangers had rendered him more unfit to rule his countrymen.
In France he had seen the refractory magistracy humbled, and royal
prerogative, though exercised by a foreign priest in the name of
a child, victorious over all opposition. This spectacle naturally
gratified a prince to whose family the opposition of Parliaments had
been so fatal. Politeness was his solitary good quality. The insults
which he had suffered in Scotland had taught him to prize it. The
effeminacy and apathy of his disposition fitted him to excel in it. The
elegance and vivacity of the French manners fascinated him. With the
political maxims and the social habits of his favourite people, he
adopted their taste in composition, and, when seated on the throne, soon
rendered it fashionable, partly by direct patronage, but still more by
that contemptible policy, which, for a time, made England the last of
the nations, and raised Louis the Fourteenth to a height of power and
fame, such as no French sovereign had ever before attained.

It was to please Charles that rhyme was first introduced into our plays.
Thus, a rising blow, which would at any time have been mortal, was
dealt to the English Drama, then just recovering from its languishing
condition. Two detestable manners, the indigenous and the imported, were
now in a state of alternate conflict and amalgamation. The bombastic
meanness of the new style was blended with the ingenious absurdity of
the old; and the mixture produced something which the world had never
before seen, and which, we hope, it will never see again,--something,
by the side of which the worst nonsense of all other ages appears to
advantage--something, which those who have attempted to caricature it
have, against their will, been forced to flatter--of which the tragedy
of Bayes is a very favourable specimen. What Lord Dorset observed
to Edward Howard might have been addressed to almost all his
contemporaries--

"As skilful divers to the bottom fall
Swifter than those who cannot swim at all;
So, in this way of writing without thinking,
Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking. "

From this reproach some clever men of the world must be excepted, and
among them Dorset himself. Though by no means great poets, or even good
versifiers, they always wrote with meaning, and sometimes with wit.
Nothing indeed more strongly shows to what a miserable state literature
had fallen, than the immense superiority which the occasional rhymes,
carelessly thrown on paper by men of this class, possess over the
elaborate productions of almost all the professed authors. The reigning
taste was so bad, that the success of a writer was in inverse proportion
to his labour, and to his desire of excellence. An exception must be
made for Butler, who had as much wit and learning as Cowley, and who
knew, what Cowley never knew, how to use them. A great command of good
homely English distinguishes him still more from the other writers of
the time. As for Gondibert, those may criticise it who can read it.
Imagination was extinct. Taste was depraved. Poetry, driven from
palaces, colleges, and theatres, had found an asylum in the obscure
dwelling where a Great Man, born out of due season, in disgrace, penury,
pain and blindness, still kept uncontaminated a character and a genius
worthy of a better age.

Everything about Milton is wonderful; but nothing is so wonderful as
that, in an age so unfavourable to poetry, he should have produced the
greatest of modern epic poems. We are not sure that this is not in
some degree to be attributed to his want of sight. The imagination is
notoriously most active when the external world is shut out. In sleep
its illusions are perfect. They produce all the effect of realities. In
darkness its visions are always more distinct than in the light. Every
person who amuses himself with what is called building castles in the
air must have experienced this. We know artists who, before they attempt
to draw a face from memory, close their eyes, that they may recall a
more perfect image of the features and the expression. We are therefore
inclined to believe that the genius of Milton may have been preserved
from the influence of times so unfavourable to it by his infirmity.
Be this as it may, his works at first enjoyed a very small share of
popularity. To be neglected by his contemporaries was the penalty which
he paid for surpassing them. His great poem was not generally studied or
admired till writers far inferior to him had, by obsequiously cringing
to the public taste, acquired sufficient favour to reform it.

Of these, Dryden was the most eminent. Amidst the crowd of authors who,
during the earlier years of Charles the Second, courted notoriety
by every species of absurdity and affectation, he speedily became
conspicuous. No man exercised so much influence on the age. The reason
is obvious. On no man did the age exercise so much influence. He was
perhaps the greatest of those whom we have designated as the critical
poets; and his literary career exhibited, on a reduced scale, the
whole history of the school to which he belonged,--the rudeness and
extravagance of its infancy,--the propriety, the grace, the dignified
good sense, the temperate splendour of its maturity. His imagination
was torpid, till it was awakened by his judgment. He began with quaint
parallels and empty mouthing. He gradually acquired the energy of the
satirist, the gravity of the moralist, the rapture of the lyric poet.
The revolution through which English literature has been passing, from
the time of Cowley to that of Scott, may be seen in miniature within the
compass of his volumes.

His life divides itself into two parts. There is some debatable ground
on the common frontier; but the line may be drawn with tolerable
accuracy. The year 1678 is that on which we should be inclined to fix
as the date of a great change in his manner. During the preceding period
appeared some of his courtly panegyrics--his Annus Mirabilis, and most
of his plays; indeed, all his rhyming tragedies. To the subsequent
period belong his best dramas,--All for Love, the Spanish Friar, and
Sebastian,--his satires, his translations, his didactic poems, his
fables, and his odes.

Of the small pieces which were presented to chancellors and princes it
would scarcely be fair to speak. The greatest advantage which the Fine
Arts derive from the extension of knowledge is, that the patronage of
individuals becomes unnecessary. Some writers still affect to regret the
age of patronage. None but bad writers have reason to regret it. It is
always an age of general ignorance. Where ten thousand readers are eager
for the appearance of a book, a small contribution from each makes up
a splendid remuneration for the author. Where literature is a luxury,
confined to few, each of them must pay high. If the Empress Catherine,
for example, wanted an epic poem, she must have wholly supported
the poet;--just as, in a remote country village, a man who wants a
muttonchop is sometimes forced to take the whole sheep;--a thing which
never happens where the demand is large. But men who pay largely for the
gratification of their taste, will expect to have it united with some
gratification to their vanity. Flattery is carried to a shameless
extent; and the habit of flattery almost inevitably introduces a
false taste into composition. Its language is made up of hyperbolical
commonplaces,--offensive from their triteness,--still more offensive
from their extravagance. In no school is the trick of overstepping the
modesty of nature so speedily acquired. The writer, accustomed to find
exaggeration acceptable and necessary on one subject, uses it on all. It
is not strange, therefore, that the early panegyrical verses of Dryden
should be made up of meanness and bombast. They abound with the conceits
which his immediate predecessors had brought into fashion. But his
language and his versification were already far superior to theirs.

The Annus Mirabilis shows great command of expression, and a fine ear
for heroic rhyme. Here its merits end. Not only has it no claim to be
called poetry, but it seems to be the work of a man who could never, by
any possibility, write poetry. Its affected similes are the best part
of it. Gaudy weeds present a more encouraging spectacle than utter
barrenness. There is scarcely a single stanza in this long work to which
the imagination seems to have contributed anything. It is produced, not
by creation, but by construction. It is made up, not of pictures, but of
inferences. We will give a single instance, and certainly a favourable
instance,--a quatrain which Johnson has praised. Dryden is describing
the sea-fight with the Dutch--

"Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball;
And now their odours armed against them fly.
Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall,
And some by aromatic splinters die. "

The poet should place his readers, as nearly as possible, in the
situation of the sufferers or the spectators. His narration ought to
produce feelings similar to those which would be excited by the event
itself. Is this the case here? Who, in a sea-fight, ever thought of the
price of the china which beats out the brains of a sailor; or of the
odour of the splinter which shatters his leg? It is not by an act of the
imagination, at once calling up the scene before the interior eye, but
by painful meditation,--by turning the subject round and round,--by
tracing out facts into remote consequences,--that these incongruous
topics are introduced into the description. Homer, it is true,
perpetually uses epithets which are not peculiarly appropriate.
Achilles is the swift-footed, when he is sitting still. Ulysses is the
much-enduring, when he has nothing to endure. Every spear casts a long
shadow, every ox has crooked horns, and every woman a high bosom, though
these particulars may be quite beside the purpose. In our old ballads a
similar practice prevails. The gold is always red, and the ladies always
gay, though nothing whatever may depend on the hue of the gold, or the
temper of the ladies. But these adjectives are mere customary additions.
They merge in the substantives to which they are attached. If they at
all colour the idea, it is with a tinge so slight as in no respect
to alter the general effect. In the passage which we have quoted from
Dryden the case is very different. "Preciously" and "aromatic" divert
our whole attention to themselves, and dissolve the image of the battle
in a moment. The whole poem reminds us of Lucan, and of the worst parts
of Lucan,--the sea-fight in the Bay of Marseilles, for example. The
description of the two fleets during the night is perhaps the only
passage which ought to be exempted from this censure. If it was from
the Annus Mirabilis that Milton formed his opinion, when he pronounced
Dryden a good rhymer but no poet, he certainly judged correctly. But
Dryden was, as we have said, one of those writers in whom the period of
imagination does not precede, but follow, the period of observation and
reflection.

His plays, his rhyming plays in particular, are admirable subjects for
those who wish to study the morbid anatomy of the drama. He was utterly
destitute of the power of exhibiting real human beings. Even in the far
inferior talent of composing characters out of those elements into
which the imperfect process of our reason can resolve them, he was very
deficient. His men are not even good personifications; they are not
well-assorted assemblages of qualities. Now and then, indeed, he seizes
a very coarse and marked distinction, and gives us, not a likeness, but
a strong caricature, in which a single peculiarity is protruded, and
everything else neglected; like the Marquis of Granby at an inn-door,
whom we know by nothing but his baldness; or Wilkes, who is Wilkes only
in his squint. These are the best specimens of his skill. For most of
his pictures seem, like Turkey carpets, to have been expressly designed
not to resemble anything in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or
in the waters under the earth.

The latter manner he practises most frequently in his tragedies, the
former in his comedies. The comic characters are, without mixture,
loathsome and despicable. The men of Etherege and Vanbrugh are bad
enough. Those of Smollett are perhaps worse. But they do not approach
to the Celadons, the Wildbloods, the Woodalls, and the Rhodophils of
Dryden. The vices of these last are set off by a certain fierce hard
impudence, to which we know nothing comparable. Their love is the
appetite of beasts; their friendship the confederacy of knaves. The
ladies seem to have been expressly created to form helps meet for such
gentlemen. In deceiving and insulting their old fathers they do not
perhaps exceed the license which, by immemorial prescription, has been
allowed to heroines. But they also cheat at cards, rob strong boxes, put
up their favours to auction, betray their friends, abuse their rivals
in the style of Billingsgate, and invite their lovers in the language
of the Piazza. These, it must be remembered, are not the valets and
waiting-women, the Mascarilles and Nerines, but the recognised heroes
and heroines who appear as the representatives of good society, and who,
at the end of the fifth act, marry and live very happily ever after.
The
sensuality, baseness, and malice of their natures is unredeemed by any
quality of a different description,--by any touch of kindness,--or even
by any honest burst of hearty hatred and revenge. We are in a world
where there is no humanity, no veracity, no sense of shame,--a world for
which any good-natured man would gladly take in exchange the society of
Milton's devils. But as soon as we enter the regions of Tragedy, we find
a great change. There is no lack of fine sentiment there. Metastasio
is surpassed in his own department. Scuderi is out-scuderied. We are
introduced to people whose proceedings we can trace to no motive,--of
whose feelings we can form no more idea than of a sixth sense. We have
left a race of creatures, whose love is as delicate and affectionate
as the passion which an alderman feels for a turtle. We find ourselves
among beings, whose love is a purely disinterested emotion,--a loyalty
extending to passive obedience,--a religion, like that of the Quietists,
unsupported by any sanction of hope or fear. We see nothing but
despotism without power, and sacrifices without compensation.

We will give a few instances. In Aurengzebe, Arimant, governor of Agra,
falls in love with his prisoner Indamora. She rejects his suit with
scorn; but assures him that she shall make great use of her power over
him. He threatens to be angry. She answers, very coolly:

"Do not: your anger, like your love, is vain:
Whene'er I please, you must be pleased again.
Knowing what power I have your will to bend,
I'll use it; for I need just such a friend. "

This is no idle menace. She soon brings a letter addressed to
his rival,--orders him to read it,--asks him whether he thinks it
sufficiently tender,--and finally commands him to carry it himself. Such
tyranny as this, it may be thought, would justify resistance. Arimant
does indeed venture to remonstrate:--

"This fatal paper rather let me tear,
Than, like Bellerophon, my sentence bear. "

The answer of the lady is incomparable:--

"You may; but 'twill not be your best advice;
'Twill only give me pains of writing twice.
You know you must obey me, soon or late.
Why should you vainly struggle with your fate? "

Poor Arimant seems to be of the same opinion. He mutters something about
fate and free-will, and walks off with the billet-doux.

In the Indian Emperor, Montezuma presents Almeria with a garland as a
token of his love, and offers to make her his queen. She replies:--

"I take this garland, not as given by you;
But as my merit's and my beauty's due;
As for the crown which you, my slave, possess,
To share it with you would but make me less. "

In return for such proofs of tenderness as these, her admirer consents
to murder his two sons and a benefactor to whom he feels the warmest
gratitude. Lyndaraxa, in the Conquest of Granada, assumes the same lofty
tone with Abdelmelech. He complains that she smiles upon his rival.

"Lynd. And when did I my power so far resign,
That you should regulate each look of mine?

Abdel. Then, when you gave your love, you gave that power.

Lynd. 'Twas during pleasure--'tis revoked this hour.

Abdel. I'll hate you, and this visit is my last.

Lynd. Do, if you can: you know I hold you fast. "

That these passages violate all historical propriety, that sentiments to
which nothing similar was ever even affected except by the cavaliers of
Europe, are transferred to Mexico and Agra, is a light accusation. We
have no objection to a conventional world, an Illyrian puritan, or a
Bohemian seaport. While the faces are good, we care little about the
back-ground. Sir Joshua Reynolds says that the curtains and hangings
in an historical painting ought to be, not velvet or cotton, but merely
drapery. The same principle should be applied to poetry and romance. The
truth of character is the first object; the truth of place and time is
to be considered only in the second place. Puff himself could tell the
actor to turn out his toes, and remind him that Keeper Hatton was
a great dancer. We wish that, in our own time, a writer of a very
different order from Puff had not too often forgotten human nature in
the niceties of upholstery, millinery, and cookery.

We blame Dryden, not because the persons of his dramas are not Moors or
Americans, but because they are not men and women;--not because love,
such as he represents it, could not exist in a harem or in a wigwam, but
because it could not exist anywhere. As is the love of his heroes, such
are all their other emotions. All their qualities, their courage, their
generosity, their pride, are on the same colossal scale. Justice and
prudence are virtues which can exist only in a moderate degree, and
which change their nature and their name if pushed to excess. Of justice
and prudence, therefore, Dryden leaves his favourites destitute. He
did not care to give them what he could not give without measure. The
tyrants and ruffians are merely the heroes altered by a few touches,
similar to those which transformed the honest face of Sir Roger de
Coverley into the Saracen's head. Through the grin and frown the
original features are still perceptible.

It is in the tragi-comedies that these absurdities strike us most.
The two races of men, or rather the angels and the baboons, are there
presented to us together. We meet in one scene with nothing but
gross, selfish, unblushing, lying libertines of both sexes, who, as
a punishment, we suppose, for their depravity, are condemned to talk
nothing but prose. But, as soon as we meet with people who speak in
verse, we know that we are in society which would have enraptured the
Cathos and Madelon of Moliere, in society for which Oroondates would
have too little of the lover, and Clelia too much of the coquette.

As Dryden was unable to render his plays interesting by means of that
which is the peculiar and appropriate excellence of the drama, it was
necessary that he should find some substitute for it. In his comedies he
supplied its place, sometimes by wit, but more frequently by intrigue,
by disguises, mistakes of persons, dialogues at cross purposes,
hair-breadth escapes, perplexing concealments, and surprising
disclosures. He thus succeeded at least in making these pieces very
amusing.

In his tragedies he trusted, and not altogether without reason, to
his diction and his versification. It was on this account, in all
probability, that he so eagerly adopted, and so reluctantly abandoned,
the practice of rhyming in his plays. What is unnatural appears less
unnatural in that species of verse than in lines which approach more
nearly to common conversation; and in the management of the heroic
couplet Dryden has never been equalled. It is unnecessary to urge any
arguments against a fashion now universally condemned. But it is worthy
of observation, that, though Dryden was deficient in that talent which
blank verse exhibits to the greatest advantage, and was certainly the
best writer of heroic rhyme in our language, yet the plays which have,
from the time of their first appearance, been considered as his best,
are in blank verse. No experiment can be more decisive.

It must be allowed that the worst even of the rhyming tragedies contains
good description and magnificent rhetoric. But, even when we forget that
they are plays, and, passing by their dramatic improprieties, consider
them with reference to the language, we are perpetually disgusted by
passages which it is difficult to conceive how any author could have
written, or any audience have tolerated, rants in which the raving
violence of the manner forms a strange contrast with the abject tameness
of the thought. The author laid the whole fault on the audience, and
declared that, when he wrote them, he considered them bad enough to
please. This defence is unworthy of a man of genius, and after all, is
no defence. Otway pleased without rant; and so might Dryden have done,
if he had possessed the powers of Otway. The fact is, that he had a
tendency to bombast, which, though subsequently corrected by time
and thought, was never wholly removed, and which showed itself in
performances not designed to please the rude mob of the theatre.

Some indulgent critics have represented this failing as an indication
of genius, as the profusion of unlimited wealth, the wantonness of
exuberant vigour. To us it seems to bear a nearer affinity to the
tawdriness of poverty, or the spasms and convulsions of weakness. Dryden
surely had not more imagination than Homer, Dante, or Milton, who
never fall into this vice. The swelling diction of Aeschylus and Isaiah
resembles that of Almanzor and Maximin no more than the tumidity of a
muscle resembles the tumidity of a boil. The former is symptomatic
of health and strength, the latter of debility and disease. If ever
Shakspeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along,
but when he is hurrying his imagination along,--when his mind is for a
moment jaded,--when, as was said of Euripides, he resembles a lion, who
excites his own fury by lashing himself with his tail. What happened
to Shakspeare from the occasional suspension of his powers happened
to Dryden from constant impotence. He, like his confederate Lee, had
judgment enough to appreciate the great poets of the preceding age, but
not judgment enough to shun competition with them. He felt and admired
their wild and daring sublimity. That it belonged to another age than
that in which he lived and required other talents than those which
he possessed, that, in aspiring to emulate it, he was wasting, in
a hopeless attempt, powers which might render him pre-eminent in a
different career, was a lesson which he did not learn till late. As
those knavish enthusiasts, the French prophets, courted inspiration by
mimicking the writhings, swoonings, and gaspings which they considered
as its symptoms, he attempted, by affected fits of poetical fury,
to bring on a real paroxysm; and, like them, he got nothing but his
distortions for his pains.

Horace very happily compares those who, in his time, imitated Pindar
to the youth who attempted to fly to heaven on waxen wings, and who
experienced so fatal and ignominious a fall. His own admirable good
sense preserved him from this error, and taught him to cultivate a
style in which excellence was within his reach. Dryden had not the same
self-knowledge. He saw that the greatest poets were never so successful
as when they rushed beyond the ordinary bounds, and that some
inexplicable good fortune preserved them from tripping even when they
staggered on the brink of nonsense. He did not perceive that they were
guided and sustained by a power denied to himself. They wrote from
the dictation of the imagination; and they found a response in the
imaginations of others. He, on the contrary, sat down to work himself,
by reflection and argument, into a deliberate wildness, a rational
frenzy.

In looking over the admirable designs which accompany the Faust, we
have always been much struck by one which represents the wizard and the
tempter riding at full speed. The demon sits on his furious horse as
heedlessly as if he were reposing on a chair. That he should keep his
saddle in such a posture, would seem impossible to any who did not
know that he was secure in the privileges of a superhuman nature. The
attitude of Faust, on the contrary, is the perfection of horsemanship.
Poets of the first order might safely write as desperately as
Mephistopheles rode. But Dryden, though admitted to communion with
higher spirits, though armed with a portion of their power, and
intrusted with some of their secrets, was of another race. What they
might securely venture to do, it was madness in him to attempt. It
was necessary that taste and critical science should supply his
deficiencies.

We will give a few examples. Nothing can be finer than the description
of Hector at the Grecian wall:--

o d ar esthore phaidimos Ektor,
Nukti thoe atalantos upopia lampe de chalko
Smerdaleo, ton eesto peri chroi doia de chersi
Dour echen ouk an tis min erukakoi antibolesas,
Nosphi theun, ot esalto pulas puri d osse dedeei.
--Autika d oi men teichos uperbasan, oi de kat autas
Poietas esechunto pulas Danaioi d ephobethen
Neas ana glaphuras omados d aliastos etuchthe.

What daring expressions! Yet how significant! How picturesque! Hector
seems to rise up in his strength and fury. The gloom of night in his
frown,--the fire burning in his eyes,--the javelins and the
blazing armour,--the mighty rush through the gates and down
the battlements,--the trampling and the infinite roar of the
multitude,--everything is with us; everything is real.

Dryden has described a very similar event in Maximin, and has done his
best to be sublime, as follows:--

"There with a forest of their darts he strove,
And stood like Capaneus defying Jove;
With his broad sword the boldest beating down,
Till Fate grew pale, lest he should win the town,
And turn'd the iron leaves of its dark book
To make new dooms, or mend what it mistook. "

How exquisite is the imagery of the fairy-songs in the Tempest and the
Midsummer Night's Dream; Ariel riding through the twilight on the
bat, or sucking in the bells of flowers with the bee; or the little
bower-women of Titania, driving the spiders from the couch of the Queen!
Dryden truly said, that

"Shakspeare's magic could not copied be;
Within that circle none durst walk but he. "

It would have been well if he had not himself dared to step within
the enchanted line, and drawn on himself a fate similar to that
which, according to the old superstition, punished such presumptuous
interference. The following lines are parts of the song of his
fairies:--

"Merry, merry, merry, we sail from the East,
Half-tippled at a rainbow feast.
In the bright moonshine, while winds whistle loud,
Tivy, tivy, tivy, we mount and we fly,
All racking along in a downy white cloud;
And lest our leap from the sky prove too far,
We slide on the back of a new falling star,
And drop from above
In a jelly of love. "

These are very favourable instances. Those who wish for a bad one may
read the dying speeches of Maximin, and may compare them with the last
scenes of Othello and Lear.

If Dryden had died before the expiration of the first of the periods
into which we have divided his literary life, he would have left a
reputation, at best, little higher than that of Lee or Davenant. He
would have been known only to men of letters; and by them he would have
been mentioned as a writer who threw away, on subjects which he was
incompetent to treat, powers which, judiciously employed, might have
raised him to eminence; whose diction and whose numbers had sometimes
very high merit, but all whose works were blemished by a false taste,
and by errors of gross negligence. A few of his prologues and epilogues
might perhaps still have been remembered and quoted. In these little
pieces he early showed all the powers which afterwards rendered him the
greatest of modern satirists. But, during the latter part of his
life, he gradually abandoned the drama. His plays appeared at longer
intervals. He renounced rhyme in tragedy. His language became less
turgid--his characters less exaggerated. He did not indeed produce
correct representations of human nature; but he ceased to daub such
monstrous chimeras as those which abound in his earlier pieces. Here and
there passages occur worthy of the best ages of the British stage. The
style which the drama requires changes with every change of character
and situation. He who can vary his manner to suit the variation is the
great dramatist; but he who excels in one manner only will, when that
manner happens to be appropriate, appear to be a great dramatist; as the
hands of a watch which does not go point right once in the twelve hours.
Sometimes there is a scene of solemn debate. This a mere rhetorician may
write as well as the greatest tragedian that ever lived. We confess
that to us the speech of Sempronius in Cato seems very nearly as good
as Shakspeare could have made it. But when the senate breaks up, and we
find that the lovers and their mistresses, the hero, the villain, and
the deputy-villain, all continue to harangue in the same style, we
perceive the difference between a man who can write a play and a man who
can write a speech. In the same manner, wit, a talent for description,
or a talent for narration, may, for a time, pass for dramatic genius.
Dryden was an incomparable reasoner in verse. He was conscious of his
power; he was proud of it; and the authors of the Rehearsal justly
charged him with abusing it. His warriors and princesses are fond of
discussing points of amorous casuistry, such as would have delighted a
Parliament of Love. They frequently go still deeper, and speculate on
philosophical necessity and the origin of evil.

There were, however, some occasions which absolutely required this
peculiar talent. Then Dryden was indeed at home. All his best scenes are
of this description. They are all between men; for the heroes of Dryden,
like many other gentlemen, can never talk sense when ladies are in
company. They are all intended to exhibit the empire of reason
over violent passion. We have two interlocutors, the one eager and
impassioned, the other high, cool, and judicious. The composed and
rational character gradually acquires the ascendency. His fierce
companion is first inflamed to rage by his reproaches, then overawed
by his equanimity, convinced by his arguments, and soothed by his
persuasions. This is the case in the scene between Hector and Troilus,
in that between Antony and Ventidius, and in that between Sebastian and
Dorax. Nothing of the same kind in Shakspeare is equal to them, except
the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, which is worth them all three.

Some years before his death, Dryden altogether ceased to write for the
stage. He had turned his powers in a new direction, with success
the most splendid and decisive. His taste had gradually awakened his
creative faculties. The first rank in poetry was beyond his reach; but
he challenged and secured the most honourable place in the second. His
imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich; it enabled him to run,
though not to soar. When he attempted the highest flights, he became
ridiculous; but, while he remained in a lower region, he out-stripped
all competitors.

All his natural and all his acquired powers fitted him to found a good
critical school of poetry. Indeed he carried his reforms too far for
his age. After his death our literature retrograded; and a century was
necessary to bring it back to the point at which he left it. The general
soundness and healthfulness of his mental constitution, his information,
of vast superficies, though of small volume, his wit scarcely inferior
to that of the most distinguished followers of Donne, his eloquence,
grave, deliberate, and commanding, could not save him from disgraceful
failure as a rival of Shakspeare, but raised him far above the level of
Boileau. His command of language was immense. With him died the secret
of the old poetical diction of England,--the art of producing rich
effects by familiar words. In the following century it was as completely
lost as the Gothic method of painting glass, and was but poorly supplied
by the laborious and tesselated imitations of Mason and Gray. On the
other hand, he was the first writer under whose skilful management the
scientific vocabulary fell into natural and pleasing verse. In this
department, he succeeded as completely as his contemporary Gibbons
succeeded in the similar enterprise of carving the most delicate flowers
from heart of oak. The toughest and most knotty parts of language became
ductile at his touch. His versification, in the same manner, while it
gave the first model of that neatness and precision which the following
generation esteemed so highly, exhibited at the same time, the last
examples of nobleness, freedom, variety of pause, and cadence. His
tragedies in rhyme, however worthless in themselves, had at least served
the purpose of nonsense-verses; they had taught him all the arts of
melody which the heroic couplet admits. For bombast, his prevailing
vice, his new subjects gave little opportunity; his better taste
gradually discarded it.

He possessed, as we have said, in a pre-eminent degree the power of
reasoning in verse; and this power was now peculiarly useful to him. His
logic is by no means uniformly sound. On points of criticism, he always
reasons ingeniously; and when he is disposed to be honest, correctly.
But the theological and political questions which he undertook to treat
in verse were precisely those which he understood least. His arguments,
therefore, are often worthless. But the manner in which they are stated
is beyond all praise. The style is transparent. The topics follow each
other in the happiest order. The objections are drawn up in such a
manner that the whole fire of the reply may be brought to bear on them.
The circumlocutions which are substituted for technical phrases are
clear, neat, and exact. The illustrations at once adorn and elucidate
the reasoning. The sparkling epigrams of Cowley, and the simple
garrulity of the burlesque poets of Italy, are alternately employed, in
the happiest manner, to give effect to what is obvious or clearness to
what is obscure.

His literary creed was catholic, even to latitudinarianism; not from any
want of acuteness, but from a disposition to be easily satisfied. He was
quick to discern the smallest glimpse of merit; he was indulgent even to
gross improprieties, when accompanied by any redeeming talent. When he
said a severe thing, it was to serve a temporary purpose,--to support an
argument, or to tease a rival. Never was so able a critic so free
from fastidiousness. He loved the old poets, especially Shakspeare. He
admired the ingenuity which Donne and Cowley had so wildly abused. He
did justice, amidst the general silence, to the memory of Milton. He
praised to the skies the school-boy lines of Addison. Always looking on
the fair side of every object, he admired extravagance on account of the
invention which he supposed it to indicate; he excused affectation
in favour of wit; he tolerated even tameness for the sake of the
correctness which was its concomitant.

It was probably to this turn of mind, rather than to the more
disgraceful causes which Johnson has assigned, that we are to attribute
the exaggeration which disfigures the panegyrics of Dryden. No writer,
it must be owned, has carried the flattery of dedication to a greater
length. But this was not, we suspect, merely interested servility: it
was the overflowing of a mind singularly disposed to admiration,--of a
mind which diminished vices, and magnified virtues and obligations. The
most adulatory of his addresses is that in which he dedicates the State
of Innocence to Mary of Modena. Johnson thinks it strange that any
man should use such language without self-detestation. But he has not
remarked that to the very same work is prefixed an eulogium on Milton,
which certainly could not have been acceptable at the Court of Charles
the Second. Many years later, when Whig principles were in a great
measure triumphant, Sprat refused to admit a monument of John Phillips
into Westminster Abbey--because, in the epitaph, the name of Milton
incidentally occurred. The walls of his church, he declared, should not
be polluted by the name of a republican! Dryden was attached, both
by principle and interest, to the Court. But nothing could deaden his
sensibility to excellence. We are unwilling to accuse him severely,
because the same disposition, which prompted him to pay so generous a
tribute to the memory of a poet whom his patrons detested, hurried him
into extravagance when he described a princess distinguished by the
splendour of her beauty and the graciousness of her manners.

This is an amiable temper; but it is not the temper of great men. Where
there is elevation of character, there will be fastidiousness.